'They'll argue the exact opposite,' Diaz said. 'It happens all the time.'Д«ut then, there are women who defend his portrayals as honest, brave, and sufficiently complex. Your portrayal of women is fucked up,'' he told me. 'There's plenty of people out there who are like, 'Fuck you. He told me that sometimes people-usually women-lambaste him at his readings and public appearances. How can an author write so convincingly from the perspective of a machismo cad and still write a book that is not itself sexist?Дiaz has walked this line before: In Drown, his 1996 debut short-story collection, and in 2007's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. That's what makes This Is How You Lose Her such a brave and risky book. We only see Yunior's dawning awareness of his subjectivity on the final pages of the book, in an epic called 'The Cheater's Guide to Love' otherwise, Diaz's commits fully to his chauvinistic method-acting. The book, then, is the story of late-blooming empathy, a long path towards gender enlightenment. We feel it in the way he mourns: Yunior loves these women, and he would do anything to keep them if only he knew how. Part of the heartbreak of this book is watching Yunior make the same self-destructive decisions again and again-and still he lacks the insight or vocabulary to understand why he feels so blown away. Diaz writes that this despair is 'pelagic,' sea-like in scope, and the feeling only deepens with time. This failure of imagination worsens Yunior's mistreatment of his romantic partners, whom he betrays serially and without flinching.Д«ut Yunior's cavalier descriptions of the way he dupes and wounds these women are at odds with the sadness he feels when they find out. And when he does directly address the reader-like when he tells us Nilda, his brother's girlfriend, has 'a chest you wouldn't believe'-he assumes we're high-fiving heterosexual males (just like he is). It's almost as though Yunior doesn't have the depth to contemplate a female psychology, let alone make one real for a third party. At the same time, he spends little space engaging with the emotional lives of female characters-their motivations, complications, and desires their reasons for entering and leaving relationships the psychological effects of his wounding betrayals. The book is filled with similar descriptions Yunior lavishes time on chronicles of body parts and erotic hydraulics. This isn't a description of a person so much as a mental checklist of physical attributes, a man scoping a woman's dimensions the way a butcher might rove his eye over a calf. No breasts, either, no ass, even her hair failed to make the grade.' But his understanding of women is-as Diaz told me in an interview by phone-' pretty fucking limited.' Take, for instance, his description of Miss Lora, an aging seductress and high school teacher: Yunior de Las Casas-narrator of many of the stories in Junot Diaz's new collection, This Is How You Lose Her-is capable of great turns of phrase and stunning social insight.

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